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On ‘Moral Expertise’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Béla Szabados
Béla Szabados*
Affiliation:
University of Regina
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Extract

Not so long ago it was fashionable to claim that it is not the moral philosopher's business to say what things are good or what actions we should perform. This view is succinctly stated by A. J. Ayer:

There is a distinction, which is not always sufficiently marked, between the activity of a moralist, who sets out to elaborate a moral code, or to encourage its observance, and that of a moral philosopher, whose concern is not primarily to make moral judgments but to analyse their nature.

On the other hand, in direct opposition to this, recently many philosophers actively moralize, in the sense that they argue for substantive normative ethical positions. In doing this they tend to assume but not to explore seriously two views: (1) that the notion of moral expertise is unproblematic, and (2) that moral philosophers in particular are moral experts. My aim in this paper is to promote the exploration of these questions. (1) is logically prior to (2). Nevertheless I begin with discussing (2); for puzzles about expertise in morals naturally emerge when one examines the credentials of candidates for the job.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 117 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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References

1 Ayer, A. J. in his editorial foreword to Nowell-Smith's, P. H. Ethics (London: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 7.Google Scholar

2 Many philosophical journals but especially Philosophy and Public Affairs contain many examples of such arguments.

3 Lemmon, E. J. “Moral Dilemmas,” The Philosophical Review 71 (1962), 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Singer, Peter “Moral Experts,” Analysis 32 (1972), 116-17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 In this connection the work of psychologists like Kohlberg may mislead, for they also tend to see moral maturity merely in terms of skills of moral reasoning. See Kohlberg, l. “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization,” Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Chicago: Rand-McNally Co., 1969Google Scholar).

6 This has been deeply felt by many, including Rousseau, Kant and Tolstoy.

7 Augustine, Saint Confessions (London: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 169Google Scholar.

8 Stevenson, Adlai E. What I Think (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), p. 174Google Scholar.

9 Mill, J. S. Utilitarianism (The Library of Liberal Arts, 1957), p. 15Google Scholar.

10 See Solzhenitsyn's, brief ‘portrait’ of Stalin in The First Circle (Bantam Books, 1968), p. 130Google Scholar: “Only he Stalin, knew the path by which to lead humanity to happiness, how to shove its face into happiness like a blind puppy's into a bowl of milk— ‘There drink up’’ ”

11 E.g., Singer, op.cit.; Grice, Russell The Grounds of Moral judgement (Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 201-3;Google Scholar Gibbs, Benjamin in “Virtue and Reason,” The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume for 1974, pp. 23–41Google Scholar

12 Phillips, D. Z. and Mounce, H. O. Moral Practices (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).Google Scholar for a similar view, see Beardsmore, R. W. Moral Reasoning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 88–89Google Scholar.

13 Phillips and Mounce, op.cit., p. 108.

14 Contrary to Renford Bambrough's view that “an attempt to appeal to experts simply transforms an ethical or political dispute into an equally unsettleable dispute about who are the ethical or political experts.” See Bambrough's “Plato's Political Analogies,” in Laslett's, Peter Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), vol. I, p. 10.Google Scholar

15 Kant, seems to have thought this. He says: “Mere analysis of the concepts of morality,” would show us that the “principle of autonomy is the sole principle of ethics.” (Groundwork, p. 108Google Scholar, Paton translation)

16 Bishop Butler, for example, held that conscience is the faculty of moral judgement and thus it has supreme moral authority. Vide Butler, Joseph Fifteen Sermons, ed. Mathews, W. R. (London: Bell and Sons, 1969), p. 53Google Scholar. For a further discussion of Butler's, views and the paradox of errant conscience, see my paper “Butler on Corrupt Conscience,” in The journal of the History of Philosophy, October 1976Google Scholar. On the other hand, Freud's account of conscience as superego allows one to speak of challenging a dictate of one's conscience.

17 Bernard Mayo argues thus in his Ethics and the Moral Life, p. 171. His view of conscience is reminiscent of Butler's.

18 Here not knowing the difference between right and wrong amounts to lack of moral concern. There seem to be individuals who appear to be unable (and not merely unwilling) to care about others. See Cleckley, Hervey The Mask of Sanity (Saint Louis: 1964).Google Scholar

19 Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 180.Google Scholar

20 Ryle, Gilbert “On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong,” in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Melden, A. I. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), p. 157Google Scholar..

21 von Wright, Georg Hendrik The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 139Google Scholar.

22 Ryle, op.cit., p. 156.

23 I am grateful to the Canada Council which provided a Post-Doctoral Research Grant in the winter of 1975, during which preliminary research for this paper was done.